For a long time, outbound marketing followed a familiar pattern. Build a segment. Write a message. Send it to everyone at once. Email and SMS largely been treated the same way. High volume, low context, limited memory.

That approach worked when customers tolerated interruption and when personalisation meant little more than inserting a first name. Today, it feels increasingly out of step with how people actually buy.

Customers expect brands to understand them. They expect relevance, timing and care. This expectation is especially strong in categories where guidance and trust are part of the product itself, but it is spreading quickly across ecommerce as a whole.

At the same time, AI is changing what is possible. Most brands have so far used it defensively, mainly to answer inbound questions and reduce support load.

The real shift is happening elsewhere.

The true opportunity for AI in commerce is not deflection. It is intelligent outbound, reaching out proactively, but only when the context is right.This is where blast marketing starts to fall away, and a new model begins.

Why Blast Marketing Is Starting to Break

It would be wrong to say that retailers do not segment today. Most do.

The issue is how those segments are created and how limited they tend to be in practice.

In many organisations, teams end up with two or three broad segments because that is all they can realistically support. Creating segments is manual, time consuming and heavily dependent on having the right data available in the first place. The segments that teams want often exist in theory, but not in reality.

As a result, outbound still relies on averages rather than individuals.

At the same time, customer expectations have moved on. According to research published by Contentful, 77 percent of consumers now expect personalised shopping experiences, and 73 percent expect brands to understand their unique needs and anticipate them. Personalisation is no longer a nice-to-have. It is the baseline.

When messages ignore context, they do not just get ignored. They erode trust. Customers are not less engaged than before. They are more selective.They respond when outreach feels timely and helpful, and they tune out when it does not.

This growing gap between what traditional outbound can deliver and what customers expect is why blast marketing is losing effectiveness.

What Intelligent Outbound Looks Like in Practice

Intelligent outbound flips the logic of traditional campaigns.

Instead of asking, “Who should we send this to?”, the question becomes,“Is now the right moment for this specific customer?”

Rather than pushing offers on a schedule, intelligent outbound responds to signals. Behaviour, questions, hesitation, repeat views and comparison patterns all indicate where someone is in their decision making.

When those signals align, outreach becomes welcome rather than intrusive.

Across Merx clients, we already see what this looks like in practice.Ads that lead into conversation deliver 40 to 60 percent higher clickthrough rates than ads that lead to a website. Single blast messages convert at 8 to 13 percent. Conversations that develop over four or more messages convert at more than 20 percent.

The pattern is consistent. When customers choose to engage in conversation, they are signalling intent. Intelligent outbound recognises that signal and responds with relevance rather than noise.

From Segments to Client-Bound Agents

To make intelligent outbound work properly, AI itself needs to change.

Most conversational tools today are session based. They answer a question, then forget everything. This works for one-off support, but it breaks down when continuity, memory and anticipation matter.

What is emerging instead is the idea of a client-bound agent.

A client-bound agent is an AI that is persistently attached to a specific customer profile. It builds understanding over time rather than starting from scratch with every interaction. It remembers context, preferences and past conversations.

This shift is already visible across retail. According to industry surveys reported by TechRadar Pro, drawing on Fluent Commerce research, over70 percent of retailers are already piloting or have partially implemented agent-style AI systems, even though only a small percentage have fully mature deployments.

The direction is clear. Brands are moving away from isolated automation and towards systems that can reason across entire customer journeys.

This is also how the best human sales associates already work. In luxury retail especially, strong associates remember clients, understand theirpreferences and reach out when it makes sense. The challenge has always been scale.

Client-bound agents allow that same model to operate consistently, across thousands or millions of customers, without losing context.

Why This Matters Beyond Luxury

This approach often starts in high-AOV categories because the economics justify the investment. But it does not stop there.

As costs come down and tooling improves, intelligent outbound becomes increasingly attractive for lower AOV industries as well. The moment relevance replaces volume, efficiency improves.

McKinsey research has found that companies that excel at personalisation generate around 40 percent more revenue than average performers. That uplift is not limited to luxury. It comes from meeting customers with the right message at the right time.

This is why intelligent outbound is best understood not as a luxury tactic, but as the future default for customer engagement.

Why This Shift Is Happening Now

Two forces are converging.

The first is expectation. Customers now expect brands to recognise them, remember them and adapt to them.

The second is capability. Agent-style AI is now viable in production environments.

Investment reflects this shift. The global AI marketing market is valued at over 47 billion dollars and continues to grow rapidly. This is notexperimental spend. It reflects a belief that AI-driven engagement is becoming core infrastructure.

Together, these forces are pushing commerce away from broadcast and towards conversation.

The Remaining Barriers and How Merx Solves Them

Despite the opportunity, many brands hesitate. The biggest concern is loss of control.

Moving away from blast campaigns means trusting systems to make outbound decisions on a brand’s behalf. That requires confidence.

From our experience, brands need three things to feel comfortable:

First, clear guardrails and QA so teams know exactly what the agent can and cannot say.

Second, feedback loops that allow teams to review edge cases and improve the agent over time.

Third, better analytics that go beyond open rates and CTRs, showing how conversations influence the entire journey.

Merx is built with all three at its core.

Merx operates with persistent customer context, not isolated sessions.It turns conversational signals into structured intelligence that guides outbound decisions. Sensitive information is filtered at input. Personal data is not sent to model providers. Special category data is not stored or used for personalisation.

This makes intelligent outbound possible without introducing risk.

From Campaigns to Care

The shift from blast marketing to intelligent outbound is not just technical. It is philosophical.

It moves brands from campaigns to care. From volume to relevance. From interruption to assistance.

AI is no longer just a way to respond faster. It is becoming a way to understand when to speak at all.

This is the future intelligent outbound points towards. And it is the future Merx is built to support.